1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a mesh routing method and a mesh routing apparatus in beacon enabled wireless AD-HOC networks, and more particularly, to a technology for enabling mesh routing having reliability and extensibility while minimizing the generation of additional control traffic for setting a route at the time of setting the route for transmitting data and commands between nodes in beacon enabled wireless AD-HOC networks.
2. Description of the Related Art
There are provided various routing techniques for transmitting data and commands between nodes under a wireless sensor network environment represented as a low-power wireless AD-HOC network. In particular, in recent years, mesh routing has needed to be supported by considering reliability and extensibility, and representative prior art may include a low-rate WPAN mesh of IEEE 802.15.5 and a mesh routing technique based on an Ad hoc On demand Distance Vector (AODV) proposed by the ZigBee alliance.
The low-rate WPAN mesh of IEEE 802.15.5 operates based on IEEE 802.15.4 PHY/MAC, performs block addressing around a mesh coordinator, collects information regarding neighbor nodes within the number of hops designated by nodes by periodically broadcasting a “hello” command within the designated number of hops, and manages the neighbor node information as a neighbor node table so as to enable mesh routing. However, in this case, since the “hello” command needs to be periodically broadcasted for mesh routing, the load is exponentially increased when the density of nodes constituting a network increases.
Meanwhile, in the mesh routing technique proposed by the ZigBee alliance, a source node broadcasts a route request (RREQ) message in order to retrieve a route for reaching a destination node and the destination node receiving the RREQ message transfers a route reply (RREP) message up to the source node to establish a route between a source and a destination by employing an AODV scheme proposed in the prior MANET. However, since this method also is based on the broadcasting of the RREQ message, the load of control traffic for setting the route is very large.